Abstract Expressionistic Photography II

Face it. All the photographs in these galleries are in fact merely flat rectangles of light. What kind of photographs could you make if you took this flatness and rectangleness as your main starting point? The Abstract Expressionist movement in art, which started in New York in the late 1940s, is said to have been a reaction against the horrors of the Second World War. Seemingly apolitical, emotional, and even perhaps nihilist, Abstract Expressionism was a sharp break from the often explicitly political and realistic Photographic Modernism and Social Realism art movements of the 1930s. This largely non-figurative school of art took inspiration from the philosophy of Existentialism, and the process of making art was considered to be more important than the final object. Abstract Expressionist painters were inspired by photographers, while photographers in turn were inspired by the painters.

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Announced:

Tuesday, 25th September, 2012 (GMT)

Submissions:

Tuesday, 2nd October, 2012 –
Monday, 8th October, 2012
(GMT)

Voting:

Tuesday, 9th October, 2012 –
Monday, 15th October, 2012
(GMT)

Processing rules:

- Heavy post-processing is acceptable, as long as your final image is closer to photography than to digital art.

- If you photograph something that has significant depth, you may want to post-process the image so much as to emphasize flatness.

- Consider taking away detail in your image.

- If you work with chemical photography, you may want to consider submitting scans of ‘Sun Prints’ — a technique explored by Abstract Expressionist photographers who placed objects directly on photo paper and then exposing it to light — which produced images with a distinct flat quality.

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